The Expression of Chronic Pain: A Multimodal Analysis of Chronic Pain Patients

Abstract

There is currently no viable objective methods to validate a patient is suffering from chronic pain. In order to investigate the face and voice of chronic pain, a pilot analysis was run using publicly available videos from a dental clinic and neurology clinic. The stimuli include patients discussing their pain in addition to segments where the patients discuss how they feel after an efficacious pain-relieving procedure. The patients in the videos suffer from sciatic pain or pain from temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD) and are real patients who have undergone a physical examination. The relevant sections from the clips were coded using a manual FACs, and a pilot stimulus was run using layered vocal analysis (LVA) software provided by Nemesysco. The results of this experiment provide valuable and applicable insight into the expression of chronic pain. This may be helpful in determining true pain patients from drug and attention-seeking individuals. In addition, these methodologies could provide a way to examine pain in individuals that may not be able to express themselves, including patients with mental disorders. The insights from this experiment suggest that these analytic methods may be applicable for additional study and possible implementation in a medical setting.